Major Speech on Shrinking U.S. Seapower Goes Ignored

On May 3, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a major speech about the Navy’s future to a Navy League audience. Overshadowing anything he said that day, however — and he said a lot — was the utter lack of attention his remarks received from mainstream media.

Recall the Sherlock Holmes tale about the dog that didn’t bark? The curious case here was the media’s silence about a secretary of defense telling the nation that the U.S. Navy shouldn’t worry much about its shrinking size (the Navy today is 11 percent short of the number of ships it needs).

Gates brushed this concern aside, arguing that it isn’t really an issue since the U.S. is so far ahead of everyone else in seapower. This advantage is a good thing. It exists because other navies are, at least for now, regional, while ours remains global. The numerical lead benefits us as a similar advantage once benefited England — by suppressing potential competitors. But China, a country not mentioned in Gates’ speech, is laboring to build a fleet including several new classes of submarines, is looking to deny our ships the Western Pacific, is constructing an aircraft carrier, and is seeking naval bases between the Middle East and Asia. It is important to recall that England, by a congruent process of reasoning and self-imposed budgetary restriction, lost a naval advantage similar to ours a century ago.

Princeton professor Aaron Friedberg notes that the rise of competing naval powers in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. forced England to acquiesce “in the loss of its longstanding control of the world’s oceans” between 1895 and 1905. This is a short time to traverse so large a strategic distance.

Gates’ speech looked at the current balance of international naval power, but ignored trends. The Navy’s combat fleet has contracted by 20 percent over the last ten years. It possesses less than half the roughly 600 ships it fielded during the Reagan administration. But neither geography nor isolationism has diluted the United States’ need for seapower. The solitary threat of Soviet naval force has been replaced by terror, the consequences of failed states, proliferation, and a growing and traditional blue-water challenge, China. The nation’s need for naval force continues to increase as the fleet continues to dwindle.

Numbers of deployed ships haven’t changed, but the demand for them has grown. National leadership’s requirement for strike operations for Iraq and Afghanistan, protecting against piracy, preventing the entry into American waters of weapons of mass destruction, defending against ballistic missiles, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and the work of special operations forces has steadily grown. More is being demanded but there is less to answer the demand.

Continuing this trend will erode the U.S.’s ability to lead international coalitions against piracy, respond to major crises with decisive force that can deter or resolve them, assure our allies in Asia with our presence that we intend to remain a great Pacific power, assist diplomacy, and support the international system that a century of American foreign policy has sought to establish.

If Congressional Budget Office projections of federal debt approaching 100 percent of GDP within the decade are correct, there’s little hope for increased defense spending and abundant reason to expect the opposite.

Under the questionable assumption that the Navy will continue to receive around $14 billion annually to replace aging ships, and with the average price of each ship being approximately $2.5 billion, the Navy will be lucky if the fleet shrinks only by another 16 percent by 2020 — to 235 ships from its current level of about 280. If the descent persists, this could result in a fleet that numbers around 200 ships in less than two decades.

Gates’ answer is to question the cost of the nation’s enduring strategic need — if we are to maintain our international preeminence — for a powerful and distributed transoceanic fleet. “Three to $6 billion is too much to spend on a destroyer,” he says. And he’s right. But will reconsideration of basic assumptions about ship design produce a cheap naval force? It hasn’t in the past. Ironclad vessels driven by steam engines with huge mechanically sophisticated guns and turrets were more expensive than sailing ships-of-the-line. And carriers bristling with high-powered aircraft are more expensive than battleships that displace half the previous generation of capital ships’ weight.

Adam Smith had good reason to note that “in modern times the great expense of fire-arms gives an evident advantage to the nation which can best afford the expense.”

If the U.S. wants to continue to field the world’s most technologically superior military, we’re going to have to pay for it. Gates’ hope for improved security at lower cost contradicts history. His warnings that the U.S. will lack the financial resources to maintain our current level of maritime dominance are as ominous for their grave implications about the future of U.S. seapower as they are strategically askance.

Gates does not ask if our current strategy, which is digging the U.S. deeper and deeper into a commitment to indefinite and extraordinarily expensive engagement in Middle Eastern and Central Asian land wars, will cost the U.S. its dominant global naval presence. He does not consider the long-term consequences if we maintain this course. He does not question whether the equal apportionment of defense resources among America’s military services reflects the nation’s future strategic needs.

And perhaps worse, these issues lie immediately at or beneath the surface of the secretary of defense’s remarks. Yet they were ignored.

Seth Cropsey is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He served as a naval officer for nearly two decades and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. He is the author of the recently published MAYDAY: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy.

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The first sign of a declining power is the decline in its Navy. Britain, even after World War II, had the second largest Navy in the world (after the United States), and now her surface fleet (note I said surface fleet; Britain still has a fair number of nuclear submarines) is arguably smaller than that of India, a former colony. True, England is trying to build two large carriers which it doesn’t really need just to prove that she’s still a global naval force, but her day has obviously faded and today she would even be hard pressed to mount a Falklands-type invasion force in an emergency. That is what happens when you let your Navy go to pieces, you become unable to mount critical global operations when the need arises, and those international emergencies tend to occur with unusual frequency these days.

Also, what Gates doesn’t seem to take into account is that, in a shooting war, you tend to lose ships. I know people don’t want to hear that, but it’s a fact of naval warfare. Great Britain almost had to withdraw the Royal Navy from the Falklands conflict because of the losses she was sustaining. Had the Royal Navy lost one, or worse, both of her small carriers during the conflict, the operation certainly would have been called off and the ships would have had to be withdrawn. And that was fighting Argentina, a country equipped with aircraft carrying conventional bombs and a few cruise missiles.

Could you imagine, just imagine, the losses the US Navy would have to sustain if we had to attack, let alone invade, a country like Iran? Iran has a huge number of cruise missiles, sea mines, and suicide boats designed to cause our Navy a lot, and I mean A LOT, of problems. Would we win the conflict? No doubt we would eventually win, but at a huge cost in both ships and crewmembers. Does Secretary Gates take any of this into account?

Another problem is the current cost of our ships. They are way, way, too expensive even by our standards. A classic example is the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). This program was screwed from the beginning. The LCS was supposed to be a small, expendable, inexpensive, but heavily-armed ship that could be used close to a hostile coast, such as Iran. What it has turned into is a large, overpriced, frigate that may now be too valuable to do the job it was supposed to do in the first place! The original cost of the ship was projected to be $220 million a piece. We have now built two of these ships and the cost has skyrocketed to over $500 million a piece, and growing. We wanted to build 55 of these ships, but with these types of cost increases it seems doubtful that we’ll be able to build all of them. You can read more about the sad state of this program here:http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/02/defense_lcscosts_080205n/

And this problem doesn’t only affect the LCS. ALL of our warships and amphibious assault ships are horribly over budget.

But, you say, the quality of these ships is really great. So what. Denmark builds the Abselon Class warships, ships that are bigger, more capable, and more versatile than the LCS and would be an ideal replacement for the LCS. Yet these ships cost about $300 million each, much less than the LCS. Denmark does not build cheap ships, so why is it that the Danes can build a better and larger and more capable ship than the United States for almost half the price? Because their development programs are much more organized than ours and the people who run those programs are held accountable for keeping the program within budget. That certainly is not the case here in the US Navy.

Bottom line is that we need to build more cost-effective ships and keep our projects within budget. If we can do that, we could build more ships with the money we already have. We must also decide if we really want to be a world power capable of projecting our influence all over the world whenever we want to. Sure, China can afford to build more warships now, but do they have ships based and patrolling the oceans literally all over the world right now? The sign of a declining power is a declining Navy. And quality vs. quantity doesn’t cut it anymore. Even the best ship can only be in one place at one time. So it’s up to the American public to decide whether or not we keep our coveted status of world power, or go the way of Great Britain.

You know nothing about naval history. Find out what happened to the Repulse and Prince of Wales during Britain’s shameful debacle in the Pacific theatre and perhaps you’ll begin to grasp that the postwar reduction in surface naval forces was actually a belated recognition of the reality, still not grasped by the carrier-mad US Navy, that surface vessels are targets–nothing more than very, very expensive targets.
The only sensible article on the topic I’ve encountered is Gary Brecher’s “This Is How the Carriers Will Die”.

One of the downsides of the Internet is that it gives morons like you an opportunity to show just how stupid they really are. Well, Shef, if you ever really cracked open a book on naval warfare you will find that the loss of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales at the start of World War II only proved that the era of the big-gun battleship was rapidly drawing to a close and that aircraft and aircraft carriers (another surface ship, go figure) were now the dominant weapons at sea. There was a transformation taking place at sea that all of the Allied powers were slow to grasp, but all of them eventually came to realize the value and importance of that versatile new weapon, the aircraft carrier.

And guess what? even though these awesome weapons worked really well, a lot of them were STILL sunk in battle. The United States, Britain, and Japan all suffered substantial carrier losses during the war, but that didn’t diminish their value. The only difference was that the United States could easily replace its losses because of its massive industrial base. But the carrier was here to stay. And even though during World War II the submarine also proved to be a formidable weapon, almost all of them were sunk by (wait for it) surface escorts or destroyers, NOT by other submarines. Submarines could sink a lot of ships, especially defenseless merchant ships, but they could be decimated (like the German U-boats were) if opposed by a strong surface fleet of desteroyers and destroyer escorts. We won’t even go into how important surface warships were to the many amphibious operations completed during the war as well.

As for Great Britain reducing the size of the Royal Navy because, to quote you, moron, “the postwar reduction in surface naval forces was actually a belated recognition of the reality, still not grasped by the carrier-mad US Navy, that surface vessels are targets–nothing more than very, very expensive targets,” you’ve got to be kidding me, right?

The Royal Navy was reduced because Brtain lost its empire. Most of the Labor governments after the war just assumed that if there was no empire, there was no need for a big Royal Navy. Even during the Cold War, where Britain’s very survival could have been at stake, it was like pulling teeth to maintain a Royal Navy that was just capable of keeping open the sea lines of communications with the United States, the NATO country that was going to have to reinforce Britain by sea in case the Cold War turned hot. True, some supplies could have been flown into England, but any military analyst worth his salt would tell you that the only way during the Cold War to reinforce Great Britain was by sea and that required (go figure) a lot of surface escorts for the merchant ships.

Even today, the Royal Navy keeps saying it needs more surface ships to complete the many missions it is given, but the years of Labor rule in Britain have reduced the once powerful Royal Navy into a mere shadow of its former self. So this reduction in the number of warships is certainly NOT a matter of choice on the part of the Royal Navy, but by the draconian cuts forced on it by the Labor Government. It will be interesting to see if the newly-elected conservative government will be able to stop the bleeding within the Royal Navy. But, given the long lead times for modern warships, it may be too late.

As for today, surface warships are just as important as ever. Whether it’s for a naval blockade, power projection, anti-piracy duty, humanitarian operations, law enforcement, amphibious operations, convoy escort duty, anti-submarine warfare, anti-mine warfare, search and rescue, convoy escort, and a whole host of other missions, modern surface warships are as important today as they were during World War II. The ships may change in size, weapons, and electronics, but the missions stay the same.

So before you start spouting off on things YOU seem to know nothing about, try a little more reading, other than the comic books you seem to be picking up. Try starting with the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings and a few other books on naval history. It could really help an idiot like you out.

well done in both comments, Libertyship46, except for the moron idiot part. Samuel Eliot Morison’s “The Two Ocean War” is a good place to start for those who need a distillation of Morison’s 15-volume history of U.S. naval operations in WW2. Which focuses on the ascendancy of the aircraft carrier and submarine, and decline of big-gun battleships.

After I read Cropsey’s post, I went and read SecDef Gates’ speech to the Navy League. There ARE major problems with Pentagon procurement, and it is unfair for Cropsey to characterize Gates’ speech as being about ‘don’t-worry-about-shrinking fleet size’.

The truly unfortunate part is that the Coast Guard went through their procurement debacle a few years ago, yet because the USCG is part of Homeland Security, the Navy was slow to learn from the same mistakes, such as allowing the prime contractor to also provide 100% oversight; let alone benefit from any design synergies, especially for USN riverine and coastal littoral platforms.

No one should make the USN and USCG into partisan footballs. Gates needs all the help he can get in pushing reform down the throat of the Pentagon.

After WWI we cut back our military drastically and for much the same reasons we are doing so now.

We were (and are) sitting on our own island far and away from the entanglements of the world – mostly self-sufficient, self-absorbed, and increasingly isolationist while new powers arose and old ones rebuilt – all filled with nationalistic anger at what they perceived as having been victimized by racist arrogant Westerners.

Those powers suffered mostly from a lack of internal resources and had to go hat-in-hand to those same Western powers to get energy and raw materials for their efforts to achieve the same standard of living that the powers enjoyed – even resources that we (us and England) that were far closer at hand to these others than to us – wWhich we were denying them by virtue of the same military power we were busy gutting to save money.

All of our bad decisions and high-handed manners came home to roost on a calm Sunday morning in December on an outpost of our empire far away from our shores. In the days that followed, small nations, peoples, and island colonies discovered to their horror that the powers that were supposed to protect them from being killed and raped and enslaved were too busy fighting to survive to keep the promises that they thought had been made to them.

Ask the Filipinos, the Koreans, Malays, the Chinese, the small countries of Europe, and the Jews about how much they were protected by the military we had gotten rid of.

Fast forward to today. Obama is so intent on replicating Roosevelt it is stunning. We are sitting on vast reserves of energy that we are locking up to protect the environment – enough for hundreds of years – while pissing away generations worth of money to protect our lifeline to the oil fields of Southwest Asia. New powers arise filled with hatred of us both justified and ludicrous.

Another Asian empire is arising filled with frustration at dealing with both our high-handedness and our stupid naval-gazing and domination of resources they need. Their astonishment at both our selfishness at not using our own resources and hording those closer to them plus our blindness at both our own self-respect and protecting our interests PLUS their desire to pull the other economies surrounding them into their sphere puts us with China right back where we were with Japan circa 1941.

Throw in Iranian fanatics bent on nuclear terror and our doom plus the beginnings of a new hostile socialist empire to our South and we are on the path to a repeat of history. Unfortunately, our enemies remember ours (they’ve commented on it often) and are unlikely to give us the opportunity the Japanese and Germany did in not waiting to start the war until they could finish us off on day one. We will reap the whirlwind from this foolish period and those that have trusted us to protect them (Israel, Europe, Japan, Korea, the Iraqi’s. Taiwan) will rue the day we decided to forget the past.

As a fellow naval officer I have to say that the navy needs a major overhaul. We have bankrupt ourselves with our incompetence. We don’t need $3 billion ships, we need ship COs that know what they are doing and to stop wasting money. The navy has continued to do less missions with more money, and that is unacceptable. The navy needs an overhaul, and Secretary Gates may be the guy to do it.

But I don’t see where Gates was interested in anything except minimizing the navy. He only prepares for conficts with places like Iraq. In other words he is preparing for the last war. How many times has that bitten us in the butt?

That also includes all the other services but the navy takes a decade or more to retool. Even cheap frigates today are more complex than carriers of WW II.

The turn over of global military power is being conducted at this very moment, clandestinely, to china. BHO is himself terrified of being THE target for everything from productivity to intellectual creativity to military might to (for the time being) shrinking marginal morality. In other words he is a coward. Cowards always abdicate. Always hide. Always play where score is never kept. Always use deception rather than sunshine.

Hey, what do you know, I just painted a portrait. I’m not even an artist.

Why the surprise? This is all part of Barry’s plan to castrate the United States and “take it down a notch.” First, Barry drives up the debt to unsustainable levels and then he says, with teleprompter help, “we can’t afford our imperialist military any more because George Bush drove the debt up so high.”

Barry doesn’t want the “world’s most technologically superior military.” In addition to his pathological hatred of this country, in his world view, China is building its military up in order to fend off the advances of the aggressive and evil United States. If we stop being a military superpower the earth will sprout hope and change and love.

In reality, the only thing that will sprout in such a scenario will be re-education camps.

This constant drip, drip, drip from Gates is getting annoying. He is merely the mouthpiece for the WON. As was stated above by Swamp, the messiah seeks to emasculate our military power in order to crush the US.

If we kill or severely cutback all our DARPA and DOD programs, modernization and production under the cries that our entitlements need financing then when we are really hit from our enemy we will be mostly defenseless. But that is the plan by these communist currently in this administration.

At most our defense spending was still in the single digits as a percentage of the GDP. While entitlements have been eating up our GDP. Is there waste in our military expenditures, sure. Are there cost overruns, yep, but do you hear the union workers at our ship buliding facilities arguing against those overruns and inflationary prices???? (que the crickets)

The only other thing besides our Constitution that has kept us a free and wonderful nation, is our military and its ability to protect our nation and project our will overseas. Without our military being the best in the world, we are dead.

Anonymous: I really doubt you are Navy from what you said in your comments. Maybe you are a naval officer from Cuba or Zimbabwe, but not our Navy.

In these dangerous times the United States needs to guard it borders. Like it or not, this country is the stabilizer in the world, but at the same time this country cant afford to this anymore. A balance needs to be found. Enjoyed reading your article.

Mr. Cropsey:
“If the U.S. wants to continue to field the world’s most technologically superior military, we’re going to have to pay for it. Gates’ hope for improved security at lower cost contradicts history. His warnings that the U.S. will lack the financial resources to maintain our current level of maritime dominance are as ominous for their grave implications about the future of U.S. seapower as they are strategically askance.”

Secretary Gates is part and parcel of the problem, and not in any way a part of the solution.
The support for the guy from certain quarters mystifies me, since I am apparently one of the few people who remember his role in the Iran-Contra debacle when he was DDI at CIA.

We have traditionally had a two-ocean Navy because of these things called the
Panama Canal and the Straits of Magellan. It may come as a bit of news to certain people, but the Chinese are operating the Panama Canal.

In a war with the PRC, should they destroy or sabotage the canal,(a fairly easy thing to do, since they also lead us with their cargo sealift assets), they will only have to deal with the 7th Fleet and whatever assets we have based on the West Coast.

Even at Navy speeds, the voyage around the tip of South America takes time, and we cannot assume that passage will be unopposed.

All this is equally valid for the other way ’round. A scuttled Cosco containership or loaded bulker in the Suez would have the Sixth Fleet and Atlantic assets having to transit around the Cape of Good Hope.

When you impair a Navy’s mobility, you have defeated one of the sine qua nons of it’s existence.

But you should know that already…or dixd you forget it?

The reason I ask is your bio:

“…He served as a naval officer from 1985 to 2004, and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.”

What I remember most about Poppy’s term in office, via-a-vis the Navy was how we got caught with a dearth of sealift assets for Desert Storm, and the RIFs that hollowed it out afterwards.

What role did YOU play in the sad naval situation we find ourselves in?

From what I glean from your bio, you’re as big a part of the problem as Gates is.

To quote the character “Dick Jones” from “RoboCop”:

” I had a guaranteed military sale with ED 209.
Renovation program.
Spare parts for 25 years.
Who CARES if it worked or not?”

And noting the Navy and Coast Guard’s track record with their newbuilds,(LMSR, LCS and the unseaworthy newbuilds of the USCG’s “Deepwater” program), since your tenure under Poppy, I’d say that that script wasn’t that far off the mark, was it?

So now you’re sounding “general quarters”…for what exactly?
Over a naval strategic environment that you likely helped to create?

LIBERTYSHIP46 has very valid things to say and they’re not new. The “Big” carriers and wildly expensive submarines have been assailed for decades with no effect (hint: did anyone learn from the Spanish Armada that big ships are at the mercy of lots of smaller ones? Did we learn nothing from the Brits example of having to pull expensive capital ships ourt of the war for fear of small aircraft?).

Then there is the sheer ineptitude of US manufacture, as best noted in the Los Angeles Class subs for the incompetence at Electric Boat and poor navy oversight. The initial blunder of M-16 manufacture, making the gun perfect for clean rifle ranges but unsuitable for the jngle where the clumsy AK-47 thrives; It took the US military 60 years to make a winning tank, the A-1; the P-51 was designed for the Brits and it took a Brit engine to make it the great plane it became, while the US was cranking out P-40′s and similar second rate stuff; nuclear powered subs were pioneered by Rickover, almost an outcast in the regular navy, and he would have been passed over for admiral if the White House hadn’t gotten involved. The ineptitude in Iraq where it took months to get a field request to some bloody commitete to act on it was a disgrace.

Only a very wealthy and luck country can blunder along like this. With Obama care we may not be in the position to spend on the military as we have in the past. Scratch “may not be” and put in “are not.”

The onbservation about the cheaper ships by the Danes is another example: we keep building super expensive overtooled ships when we could have three for the price of one. This cannot keep up.

I just finished Winston Churchill’s “The Gathering Storm” last night. It covers the origins of WWII up to the time of Churchill forming a national government and becoming prime minister, just after the Brits pulling out of Norway and just before the invasion of Holland, Belgium, and France.

The operations of the Royal Navy against the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe shows the power and limits of naval power. Britain was willing to lose ships to support their attempts to block the German invasion of Norway and especially the port of Narvik and the transport of Swedish iron ore through that ice-free port. Had Britain been successful at Narvik, they may well have invaded Sweden from the North to gain control of the iron mines.

This book (and the other four volumes in the series) offer excellent study of why control of the seas is essential and how one goes about using seapower.

Gates, an obamanite demon third class, is simply following his masters’ instructions to emasculate our military. Then, when the islamic demand for our surrender is made, the rationalization will be, “Well, we weren’t strong enoubh to fight back, so we had to capitulate.” The Traitor-In-Chief is set to deliver us into the hands of his islamic co-conspirators. Revelation represents Islam as The False Prophet, and the international banking clique, or New World Order as The Beast. Both are subservient to the Devil, Satan, master of all who choose to oppose God. Both major parties are under his control, as are most americans. We are engaged in a spiritual battle, and, in the end, our Lord, Jesus Christ, will win. The fools who oppose Him are blind to this fact, of course.

Gates lost all credability early on. He was kept on because he wants a government job, and President Obama gets a Bush crony to provide cover for the damage he wants to do to the US military. President Obama is using him for the dirty stuff, and will toss him like a used paper napkin when he’s used up. Killing the F22 production line was treasonous; Russia just fielded it own version in pictures recently, China still has a next gen fighter on the drawing board, and our allies wanted to buy copies of it! The F35 is not a true next generation fighter like the F22 sadly.

During the campaign there was a reason candidate Obama talked of wanting a domestic quasi-military organization that was funded to the tune of the US military; he was speaking to the lefties who consider the US military their enemy. If they had not gotten so much push back on their agenda, I imagine they would have gotten to attacking the US military already.

Gates is a mental-midget withno vision. None. He’s guitly of fighting the last war, as thesaying goes and is handicapping us in regards to the next one. The fact that he was found to be acceptable to the D’s in congress ath the time and remained in the cabinet under obama tells me all I need to know about him, but there’s so much more to the defeatist.

Oh no….he’s not a stupid man at all. He’s FAR worse. His history is that he’s a consummate “Yes man”, telling his superiors exactly what he thinks that they want to hear, regardless of the realities that may dictate otherwise.

This is a bad, bad trait for a business executive, but in a government executive in intelligence and war-fighting areas of responsibility, it can be catastrophic.

To recap when Gates first crawled out of the anonymous bureaucracy to media attention, as Deputy Director of Intelligence at CIA, who “loaded the dice” of his analysts’ reports about Iran to jibe with what some in the Reagan NSC wanted to hear…that there were “moderates” in Iran whom we could do establish a rapprochement with by selling missiles to.

I certainly can’t argue w/ your assesmnent, Bilgeman.
I knew there was a reason he was so acceptable to the D’s, and even though his boot-licking got him to where he is, his intellect hasn’t been of any assistance.
But no matter which way you slice him, he’s a handicap for the US.

And to Rockford’s point @ 16, the majority of the top brass are more interested in cerrerism than militarism, as so amply displayed by Casey’s “The tragedy would be if diversity suffered” non-sense. As a former soldier, I find that offensive and a complete breech of the covenant between officers and enlisted that implies our lives are actually important and won’t be pissed away. Mission first, but to implicitly sacrifice soldiers in the name of ‘diversitry’ is reprehensible.

To put another view on Libertyship46′s point regarding costs, in an era where technology cost DECREASE at an accelerating rate for consumers, in the government sector the latest and greatest costs exponentially more. The 2nd Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, the USS Eisenhower, entered the fleet in 1977 with a 2008 constant dollar cost of $2.7 billion. The tenth and last carrier in the class, the USS George HW Bush, was commissioned in 2009 at a cost of $6.2 billion. Same basic end product, but with all of our “advancements” in technology and shipbuilding knowledge the cost doubled in real dollars.

F4E $16.5 million
F14D $50.0 million
F/A18E $60.3 million
F35 $89.5 million

Presumably, each system was designed at the cutting edge of contemporary technology. Why, then, has there been a 500%+ increases in real costs? More importantly, why don’t the taxpayers hold anyone accountable for this remarkable fraud?

Where is the Alfred Thayer Mahan of our day. Sadly his book containing the lectures back
in 1905 is now out of print. “The influence of seapower on world history”. The ascendancy
of aircraft in WW II did not fully replace the need for a sound and effective naval presence
for world politics.

You are absolutely correct!!! Where, indeed, are our Carl Vinsons of today, the great American Congressman who was the champion of the US Navy and always maintained that “sea power” always equated to “global power.” We badly need great naval thinkers and strategists like Mahan today, somebody who will not only clearly explain to the American public why sea power is still so critical in this day and age and why, with most of the world’s economy being transported by sea, keeping open merchant trade routes all over the world is essential for survival. I hope we find these people, because we do need them, and fast, before our Navy shrinks any further.

Believe it or not, Gene Taylor, Mississippi, chair of the House Armed Services sub-committe for SEAPOWER AND EXPEDITIONARY FORCES, is the best we have. Taylor was instrumental in helping the Coast Guard undo their Deepwater procurement debacle in 2006-7 (he is also on Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation).

Not to mention having a face that if it isn’t a masterpiece of plastic surgery, SHOULD be.

“Taylor was instrumental in helping the Coast Guard undo their Deepwater procurement debacle in 2006-7 (he is also on Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation).”

While he might be due some measure of plaudit for finally recognizing what had, by that point, become manifestly obvious to even the most casual of observers, let’s not yet bake him a cake and hire a brass band for him, because he and his committee left the job half done.

Nobody has yet gone to prison over the right royal screwing the USCG received in Deepwater.

No flag officers have been court-martialled and cashiered from the service for it.

Think about what Deepwater actually accomplished for a minute. An entire class of cutters was declared to be unseaworthy…the US Navy and Coast Guard have never in their histories…EVER…suffered a defeat such as this at the hands of foreign enemies’ action.

It took domestic enemies to accomplish that.

And yet all these traitors get their plaques and their latest medals and retire to sit on the boards of the corporations they spent their careers pimping their own services out to.

It seems to me that todays USN leadership is more interested in increasing diversity, making the force half female, and revoking Don’t Ask Don’t Tell than military effectiveness.

In the Navy’s defense, they’ve done a lot of things right regarding weapons systems. The F-18 Hornet/SuperHornets are outstanding multi-purpose fighter-bombers but its affordable cost allowed the Navy to fill its carriers with them. Compare that to the US Air Force which has the superb, but hideiously expensive F-22 Raptor and Congress bought less than 200 for them. In the same vein, the SH-60s series helicoptor has been outstanding. Same with the Aegis Tico cruisers and Burke destroyers. The new USN Virginia class submarines are awesome — I’d hate to be on ship with one of those things stalking me.

A agree that cutting edge will always be expensive – but that’s why I included the Nimitz-class comparison. A Nimitz-class carrier built in 2009 is hardly cutting edge stuff.

Another case in point, a 2009 NASA symposium detailed that the entire Apollo program cost $170 billion in 2005 dollars. The program REQUIRED the creation of dozens of new technologies. The recently cancelled Constellation program’s initial budget was $230 billion in 2004 dollars. How? Why?

Waste has become a feature, not a bug, of not just military, but all government procurement.

“A agree that cutting edge will always be expensive – but that’s why I included the Nimitz-class comparison. A Nimitz-class carrier built in 2009 is hardly cutting edge stuff.”

Cost of Nimitz carrier tripled most likely due to enormously more complicated computer and networking technology of today, versus 1977 (when Eisenhower was built). You need vast networks of cutting-edge computer hardware and software to process many critical functions, such as radar, sonar, communications etc. You get what you pay for.